Google's Chrome OS To Launch In Fall 375
Kidfork writes "On Wednesday Google's vice president of product management said that this fall Google will launch Chrome OS to compete with Microsoft Windows. More than 70 million users already use the Chrome Browser, and Google expects at least 1 million users of the OS by day one of release."
Not me (Score:2, Interesting)
I prefer to keep my data where it belongs, on my machine and encrypted on backup servers.
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Can only guess... (Score:4, Interesting)
We can only guess what information it will suck up and report back to Google.
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We can only guess what information $PROPRIETARY_OS will suck up and report back to $VENDOR.
Re:Can only guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since Google's entire business model revolves around advertising (and thus, customer targeting), while Microsoft, Apple (and Linux, in a fashion)'s business model revolves around selling OSes, I think it would be pretty easy for MS or Apple to simply say, "We will never collect any data about our OS users' application usage, browsing habits, or other personal information."
Google simply can't afford to say that. So no, not exactly the same thing at all.
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I think it would be pretty easy for MS or Apple to simply say, "We will never collect any data about our OS users' application usage, browsing habits, or other personal information."
Except they have never said that, nor will they ever.
Chrome OS is also open source, maybe there will be some nice branch projects in the future. I'm concerned about how their OS is so entwined with Flash though, it hardly has a stellar reputation for security.
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I can safely guess that the processor in my computer doesn't even have a networking stack built in.
Perhaps if you're so confident in the security of windows you'd like to explain why 98% of the email hitting my server comes from windows botnets?
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I can safely guess that the processor in my computer doesn't even have a networking stack built in.
Why? Did you analyse it? Do you have a good reason to trust AMD and Intel? You're constructing a strawman, anyway, as you don't need something that sophisticated to backdoor a seemingly secure system. What would be entirely unreasonable to "guess" is that there are no undocumented opcodes or sequences of fetched memory values which will cause the processor to bypass its current protection settings.
Perhaps if you're so confident in the security of windows you'd like to explain why 98% of the email hitting my server comes from windows botnets?
Because 90% of unmanaged desktops run Windows.
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Perhaps because 98% of the people out there who are retarded when it comes to securely using their PCs happen to use windows?
Also because 85%+ market share is where the money is? I guarantee you that if Linux or OSX had 85% of the market share, Either OS would be identically compromised on a similar widespread basis.
Speaking of which, at hacking competitions, which OS is usually the one to fall first?
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I don't think calling all windows users retarded is entirely fair. Some of them have no choice.
Re:Can only guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
No no, don't get me wrong. I use windows at work because I have to as well. I dual boot it at home to play games because most games I want to play are windows native and I got tired of fighting with WINE and VMs trying to get 80 to 90% functionality... I boot into Linux for web browsing, email, IM, i.e. essentially everything but gaming.
I neither love nor hate windows. It is what it is. It's a mature, robust OS that covers the vast majority of needs of most people... just like the other two do.
My point was that most people who don't know anything about how to properly use their computer when it comes to security (don't click on the flashing ads on the suspect web pages. don't install software you don't know the source of. don't click on links in emails from people you don't know. scan for malware on a regular basis, etc. etc) are using windows.
These same people would, in theory, be just as careless under OSX or linux, the difference is due to the lack of viruses/malware/developed exploits for thsoe operating systems (currently), those users would be playing traditional russian roulette around with a gun with only 1 bullet instead of the fully loaded gun that windows represents.
I man the systems support line for a major software company. I work with these people every day. They're not bad people, they just have never had any training on how not to be security retarded, and they don't really want any training because they have other stuff to worry about... until they find out they have a massive security breach and they're about to get sued.
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at hacking competitions, which OS is usually the one to fall first?
Pwn2Own 2010: Google Chrome is the last man standing [downloadsquad.com]
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I guarantee you that if Linux or OSX had 85% of the market share, Either OS would be identically compromised on a similar widespread basis.
That myth would make sense except for the following facts. OS8 and OS9 both had less marketshare than OSX yet they had viruses and OSX has none. I would even believe it if OSX had a few viruses but it doesn't. If it were that easy to get something in the wild as you say it is, some hacker somewhere would have done it already just to say they did. Pwn2own is a game, not the real thing. Don't confuse the two.
Also, consider this. People running macs obviously have more disposable income. And since yo
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Except it's open source. And it can't suck up any information you don't enter. If you're worried about people spying on what you do online, either use encrypted connections, or don't go online.
You might want to check over your shoulders whenever you go out in public to make sure nobody is following you - you never know, they may find out what brand of toilet paper you buy, or see what type of films you enjoy watching at the cinema!
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Wait, Google's servers (where the data is stored) are open source? Can I audit their deployment too?
Obviously that information has already been "sucked up" if it's on their servers. OP seems to have been thinking more of what info it will suck up even when you're on non-Google owned websites.
What? Afaict, your argument reduces to, "It's secure because at least if I want to keep something private they don't force me to give it to them." Similarly, every government guarantees freedom of expression because they can't do anything about internalised expression (dreaming?), I guess.
I didn't say it was secure. I said that if you don't want people to know certain info, don't give it out on unsecured connections or using software that you haven't vetted for security. This has nothing to do with government, because you don't have the option to opt-out of your government (unless you move country).
Ah, the second prong on the anti-privacy trident. When it's not, "If you have something to hide, you shouldn't be doing it," it's, "actually I've decided you have nothing worthwhile to hide anyway!"
Yep
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Obviously that information has already been "sucked up" if it's on their servers. OP seems to have been thinking more of what info it will suck up even when you're on non-Google owned websites.
But the purpose of ChromeOS is to ensure that all your data - documents, spreadsheets, etc. - are stored/manipulated/analysed by Google's servers. Current Windows systems aren't like this. Unless you are really interesting, what's on your drive remains on your drive.
American liberties are being eroded on many fronts with stuff like the PATRIOT act, and these guys are more worried about Google improving the relevance of their advertisements instead of going out and killing the government,
Who do you think builds the tools that government uses to follow and exploit its people? Would you like a list?
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Who do you think builds the tools that government uses to follow and exploit its people? Would you like a list?
Yes, please, that sounds like fun :p
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That was to be read in the sense of, "Would you like me to wipe for you, or can you wipe yourself?" You appeared to choose the former :-).
Why don't you pick a country, select a particular aspect of the country supposedly managed by the state (e.g. prison, military, police, security, healthcare) and find out who are the major government contractors. Identify symbiotic lobbying efforts. Identify individuals on boards of directors who have had previous involvement in government.
N.B. Don't assume that a Western
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Actually, no. Visa and Amex -- and MasterCard and Discover -- only know how much you pay in total at the checkout. Even if you're buying a lot of tinfoil to make your hats. They know WHERE you shop -- and when -- but not what you buy.
The MERCHANT knows the details, though. But they can't tie it to you, specifically. Oh, unless you use one of those VIP cards...
Re:Can only guess... (Score:4, Interesting)
If your browser is open source, you can change its behaviour to be in line with what you want. Duh. Then you just have to worry about the security of your actual connection, and what any person or machine at the other end of your connection is going to do with the data you are transmitting.
Yes, I don't care who knows what I like to buy or do at the cinema. Though I haven't entered any supermarket incentive card schemes because I know they're pretty much just for marketing schemes, and I don't feel the need to squeeze 0.1% extra value or whatever out of every purchase I make.
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Yep I really don't get the distinction you're making there, because companies already can track stuff like toilet paper sales on a massive scale, it would still be collected even if you were entirely anonymous. I think people are (or at least should be) more concerned with the ability to be anonymous than outright hiding everything that they do.
Re:Can only guess... (Score:4, Insightful)
Browse the source code line for line to know exactly how it behaves, you mean?
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Yes, exactly. What, you think that's unpossible? There's a legion of nerds out here who will prove you wrong.
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This isn't going to compete with Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news: 2011. Year of the Chrome Desktop (tm).
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It's going to compete with Linux.
True, until game-manufacturers come up with Chrome-compatible games and other software companies make chrome-compatible applications?
Already, Office exists by Google too... and creating a replacement for minesweeper really isn't that difficult.
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It's an OS to launch and run a browser, which does *all* the work .... and do as little as possible otherwise ....
It's competing with very little ....at the moment, except if you have a thin client desktop machine ?
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So, it is competing with the iPad?
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Actually, I think it'll be mostly competing with Android, which makes this whole thing kind of bizarre.
Why isn't Google packaging a version of Android as Chrome? A restricted version of Android would work fine, and give tinkerers a path up, sell better, allow local apps which are specially judged safe for Chrome/written with tattlers to integrate it into the cloud data, etc.
Two completely separate OS systems will cause confusion and not allow one to leverage work done on one for the other.
This seems dumb.
well, there ARE a lot of them out there... (Score:2)
no, that's not what it's for (Score:3, Interesting)
ChromeOS is not general competition "with Microsoft Windows". Windows has always been about delivering services on your desktop using the native CPU power and full set of UI capabilities, ensuring availability, low latency, full features and (relative) privacy.
Google Apps deliver a quite limited subset of general office suite features available only under certain environments. They are completely inadequate where privacy is of concern.
ChromeOS is another option for Netbooks - i.e. it might be suitable as another alternative in the already harmfully and unnecessarily flooded market of Netbook operating systems. But no firm should entertain using ChromeOS to prepare content.
Re:no, that's not what it's for (Score:5, Interesting)
And why is it impossible to solve the privacy issues in the long run? The way I look at it, if the economic benefits of the "cloud" model are good enough, it's only a matter of time until the other issues are solved over time. Consider checks as an example of this idea. Initially, they seem retarded (I'm going to give you this little piece of paper which is a promise from me to you that my bank will give you this amount of gold if you go there to call on it). Stupid. However, when you consider that the same innovation (banks and checks) allowed you to draw on your account from anywhere that bank had a branch, and enabled you to perform large transactions without having to carry all of your gold with you all of the time, it is obvious that the transactions enabled by the innovation are valuable enough on average to outweigh the risks inherent in the system. Even today there is a tremendous amount of check fraud, but by god, we use them like there is no tomorrow. Why? because without them (and their equivalent financial instruments) our modern society could not exist.
The new "store everything somewhere else and access it from anywhere" model has very similar risks, but also very similar benefits. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the old model in many ways and will, over time, enable valuable use cases that we have not even imagined yet.
so, returning to my original question, why can't we solve these concerns in the long run? Because if it's not impossible, it is simply inevitable.
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The privacy implication for banking is that banks, and by extension the government, know what amounts of money are coming and going - not always precisely when you pay cash or know which offshore banks to use.
The privacy implication for the cloud is that Google, selected third parties and the government know every detail about all work you do on a computer.
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Compete with Windows?! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Google will launch Chrome OS to compete with Microsoft Windows.
Sorry, where does it say that they are aiming to compete with Windows, because it doesn't mention windows in TFA. They've never claimed to try and do that - they're targetting a completely different market. Chome OS is just a browser than boot up with no host operating system. Windows IS an entire operating system.
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How do you expect anyone to do any work on Chrome OS? That recent article said that they are using Linux or OSX in place of Windows, not Chrome OS. At this point in time, Chrome OS is only really useful for anything that a browser can do. That is a lot of stuff these days, but there are still some apps that people will need a full OS for - for example proper 3D gaming, creating art/music, or doing pretty much any kind of software development.
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You could use it for office productivity tasks for bog standard office workers sure, but then all your company's private data is being held on a 3rd party server - which doesn't seem like something most bosses would want.
I think eventually browsers/Chrome OS probably will be able to fulfil all the requirements of a "real" OS (though probably in a rather roundabout, inefficient manner), but yes, we haven't reached that point yet.
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But if the adoption rates for Google Apps (e-mail service specifically) are any indication, we're getting there, and faster than some people think. E-Mail is a highly sensitive service all things considered from a data security perspective, but companies have already proven surprisingly willing to migrate to hosted third party services -- even before the emergence of Google Apps (lots of hosted exchange providers out there). Sure not many big firms have done it, but an increasing number of large universit
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At this point in time
We are living in interesting times.
I didn't say "Google has won the OS war", I said they're starting one. Microsoft has the Maginot wall, well established and unshakable, and Google has the Highway and high-speed tanks.
The thing is, right now it's 1939 and you're telling me "they only have tanks and highways at this point in time" and I think that in five years' time they'll have stuff that you wouldn't believe [wikipedia.org] because you're too focused on how things are at this point in time.
P.S. I'm only comparing Google
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potentially
That's what I'm talking about.
They don't have a product that does all the things windows does, but they're working on it, expanding its reach niche by niche. It's war, I tell you.
nice try google (Score:5, Funny)
What I want (Score:5, Interesting)
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Of course, this misses the "without missing a beat" part of your solution, but it's a start.
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Just use Opera. It does what you want for some time now.
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For firefox, look at the weave plugin.
No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
First Google begins by tracking everything you search for. Then, with their browser, they want to track everywhere you go on the internet. Now, with their operating system, they want to track everything you do, period.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Funny)
You missed a lot of evil steps in between like, in no particular order: "Then they want to index all your e-mail and serve you up targeted advertisements, then they want to index everything on your desktop via Google Desktop, then they want to harvest and store all your documents in the cloud with Google Docs, then they want to have all of your appointment and todo information cataloged in Google Calendar, then they want to know where you are at all times with Google Latitude, then they want to know where you plan on going with Google Maps, then they want to catalog your shopping habits with Google Shopper/Goggles, then they want to know about your astronomy interests with Google Sky Map, then they want to catalog all your SMS messages and listen to all your voicemail and telephone calls with Google Voice, then they want to index all your DNS name resolution requests via their resolvers, etc." Google is absolutely insidious!
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You forgot to mention search Prof, they have something to do with search engines I seem to recall.
Bow before chrome (Score:2)
I for one will welcome our shiny new overlords.
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Revisionist history with Sundar Pichai (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some choice quotes in the article's source article [reuters.com] over at Reuters.
Here's one of my favorites, from Sundar Pichai:
Wow, lots of revisionist history here. It turns out that Microsoft wasn't/isn't bundling web browsers with Windows since Windows 98. I mean, they must not have been, because they weren't one of the "few... operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work" such as "Gmail" and "Facebook."
Seriously, did he think no one would notice that he was saying that Chrome OS is one of the few operating systems that can run web applications?
I don't need a B.S. in Lieology to detect the problem with that logic!
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There seems to be a reading comprehension problem on your part here.
The question being posed is: "If I write a new OS now, won't developers have to write all new apps?"
Answer: "No, because we're designing the OS for users of web apps, which do not need to be ported. They'll 'just work' because they're already platform independent."
In the past, before web apps existed or had come into significant use, this was a huge barrier for writing (or, more accurately, marketing) a new OS. e.g. "Why should I switch to
Re:hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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DRM is the future. Get used to it.
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Piracy is the future, get over it.
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Piracy leaves no future for outdated, dinosaur business models. Accept it.
Fixed that for you. And I've long accepted and praised it.
Re:hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
TA-DA!
I wonder what the movie industry could come up with if they spent more than the 30 seconds it took me to pull that out of my ass?
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I don't blame him either. Hell, If I could get such an amount, I'd be asking it as well.
That was not my point.
You don't *need* a $20M Daniel Radcliffe to make a good movie.
The Blair Witch Project had a total budget of $22K.
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Re:hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure farmville and mafiawars will get higher framerates on these systems and have a totally unfair advantage
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Via GMail, or Wave, like everyone else.
-dZ.
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Actually - that's just plain wrong. According to the organisors of the international gaming olympiad - the profile of the typical hardcore gamer is 40+, single, high-earning with significant disposable income and not much to spend it on but gaming gear.
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the profile of the typical hardcore gamer is 40+, single, high-earning with significant disposable income and not much to spend it on but gaming gear.
They also must have low IQ's as well... Not much to spend it on? are these people brain dead meat puppets? Motorcycles, Cars, Jetpacks, Overpriced stereos... I can list 90,000 things other than videogames to spend my high-earning money on that is not only more fun, but get's you way more chicks...
A sports car is more impressive to a lady than a 6 digit X
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They also must have low IQ's as well...
Depending on which test you believe, 127 to 132. Hi.
Not much to spend it on? are these people brain dead meat puppets? Motorcycles, Cars, Jetpacks, Overpriced stereos...
You can't have both? I've got a pair of Sennheiser HD 650s with a pretty impressive amp and source, had a modified LS1, have a 21" speed boat, and own a Ps3 and wii (360 redringed on me), and two computers.
I can list 90,000 things other than videogames to spend my high-earning money on that is not only more fun, but get's you way more chicks...
A sports car is more impressive to a lady than a 6 digit Xbox achievement point number.
depends entirely on the lady in question. I submit that you're going to want to spend more time long term with the lady who digs gaming than the one who's only interested in you because you can afford to drive her around in an M6 or 911.
Playing a single
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Re:hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
>They also must have low IQ's as well... Not much to spend it on? are these people brain dead meat puppets? Motorcycles, Cars, Jetpacks, Overpriced stereos... I can list 90,000 things other than videogames to spend my high-earning money on that is not only
more fun, but get's you way more chicks...
All of which has this in common: they are LEISURE items - why does choosing one leisure item over another define your IQ ?
Also - most high-earning men that age are married, presumably this at least marginally reduces the number of additional chicks they actually NEED to get.
>A sports car is more impressive to a lady than a 6 digit Xbox achievement point number.
To some ladies. Perhaps even a significant majority - but most certainly not for ALL ladies.
>A motorcycle is far more fun than ANY driving game on any gaming platform.
To you. To me. Not to everyone.
Besides, much as I prefer my bike over driving games, I prefer WoW over golf - tastes differ. Why the aggro dude ?
>Racing with your local racing club on a real track is far more fun than any game. $10,000 can get you a nice Miata and all the racing upgrades to really tear it up at the track. a 1.8 with a turbo in a miata makes for real fun on a real track (not a redneck oval)
To you. To some other people. Not to everybody. A helluva lot of people will think THAT is the sign of a low IQ. Choosing to risk your life at high-speed in the real world (where you do NOT respawn).
>Hang gliding is an absolute rush.
Again... to you. I think RAIDING is an actual rush.
I don't fit the profile, I've just turned 30, but I am a high-earning single male without much other financial responsibility. I pay my bond and since I don't have other debt - I got plenty of cash to burn even after making investments. Why the hell should you get to decide that burning it on hanggliding is smarter than burning it on the Cataclysm expansion ?
Talk about having your head so far up your own ass you can't see the crud for the dingleberries...
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Just noticed a minor oversight in my post. The profile specifies 40+ and single so that married majority don't apply. But then again high-earning 40+ singles tend to be divorcees - in case you missed it, 40+ divorcees pretty much the bottom-feeders of the gene-pool anyway - so if they enjoy blowing up heads in halo rather than another bar-pickup tonight... who are you to judge ?
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Just noticed a minor oversight in my post. The profile specifies 40+ and single so that married majority don't apply. But then again high-earning 40+ singles tend to be divorcees - in case you missed it, 40+ divorcees pretty much the bottom-feeders of the gene-pool anyway - so if they enjoy blowing up heads in halo rather than another bar-pickup tonight... who are you to judge ?
Well he might be a 40+ divorcee who has dedicated his life and wealth to the betterment of others.
Re:hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Fixed that for you.
Thank you, slave.
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Well, of course... his name ends with Borg.
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It's a hacked up version of linux. Even if you could get WINE working with it, You're only going to be able to get a few windows games working. However, that's not what the OS is intended for. It's a platform for a web browser. It's the most minimalistic OS since the 80s.
It'll probably run flash games just fine, but you can do that with any existing system so why go to ChromeOS just for that?
Actually, considering you can get Chrome on all 3 major OSes as it is, I don't understand why anybody would use Chrom
Re:hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
It'll probably run flash games just fine, but you can do that with any existing system so why go to ChromeOS just for that?
Because if that is all you do, then it *will* do it better, as that is all it can do, making it faster. One example of a perfect place is my netbook, that I only use when I travel. I only check email, browse and hit facebook. Of course, this is after I spend a couple of hours updating Windows XP because I hadn't used the thing in two months. I'm also trying to get us to move our accounting software to something that is web based, on our intranet server. If I could do that, then this is all we would need in the office as well, as everything else we do in via the web. Even MS *.doc files can be read online, which is fine as we don't generate many of those.
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I'm also guessing (perhaps naively) that it will boot much faster.
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That is supposed to be one of the main benefits, and additionally, it will sleep/wake up in one second. More importantly, with it running so little software, sleep mode should be more reliable, although that isn't the problem it used to be even with Windows. For kiosk systems, basic access systems, "mom's first computer" (and I don't want to have to maintain it weekly), and plenty of other limited use applications, this could be a good thing.
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Google owns YouTube, they likely are pretty set when it comes to codecs. And with HTML 5 coming on strong, they would be positioned pretty well.
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>Of course, this is after I spend a couple of hours updating Windows XP because I hadn't used the thing in two months.
Is the Chrome OS wont need updates? I have an old ubuntu install I boot up every so often and the updates are just as bad, if not worse. Modern OSs require updates. Theyre all moving targets.
I'm also very skeptical of the claims of "I just need a browser!" Every user who told me that or something similar adds "Oh and yahoo chat, and my toolbars, and it must work with this shitty printer
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1) Wine runs plenty of games, provided that you have a good enough video card. I personally use it for Supreme Commander, Borderlands, C&C3, and the StarCraft II Beta - and I'm only using a GeForce 8600M.
2) Linux has it's own games. In addition to the FOSS games there are plenty of indie titles, all of Id's games support Linux, and we're anticipating Steam for Linux [phoronix.com] in the near future.
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That being said, wasn't the point of Chrome to be a sort of cloud OS? Given that Larry Ellison predicted that we wouldn't be using PCs well over a decade ago and we're still using them, I'm guessing this is going to be more of a clod OS than a cloud OS. And such a thing will probably not be any good for gaming any time soon. Well, at least for
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don't understand why anybody would use ChromeOS on a real PC at all anyway. Maybe on a little netbook or something... but on a real pc/laptop? why?
My netbook has as fast a processor, three times the drive space and twice the memory as the desktop I built five years ago. It streams fullscreen videos flawlessly. Hell, the PC I use at work is ten years old and running XP. My netbook is running Windows 7 (starter). If it won't run any version of Linux out there (which I fully intend to install once I get a thu
Re:Um... (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't it already said that it's illegal to integrate your browser into your operating system?
No, integrating a web browser into an operating system is completely legal. It is illegal, however, to attempt to use an effective monopoly in the desktop operating systems market to gain an effective monopoly in the web browser market.
Google has approximately no market share in the desktop OS market, so this is not an issue. They may have an effective monopoly in the search engine market (debatable), but they are not requiring Chrome or ChromeOS for their search engine so this is also not an issue.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you need to use Chrome to use Google - no
Do you need to use ChromeOS to use Chrome - no
Do you need to use Google if you use Chrome and ChromeOS ... probably not
Do Google have a large market share in browsers - No
Do Google have a large market share in OS's - No
No monopoly behaviour here ....
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Micro$erf,
Read your Jackson [justice.gov]. Microsoft "[enjoyed] monopoly power" as defined by the Sherman act, and that finding of fact was never overturned [wikipedia.org].
Sorry, you were saying something funny?
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You are doing what is typical of a layperson when they're met with technical language, which is to take two different phrases with some similar words then to assume they mean the same thing. Tech geeks hate it when non-geeks do this but somehow think it's acceptable for them to do it in other fields.
I asserted, "MS didn't have an effective monopoly."
You asserted, "MS enjoyed monopoly power." You will notice throughout the document that MS is described never as a monopoly but repeatedly as having "monpoly po
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Still, you have not debunked his main point. MS used its dominance (not monopoly) in the OS market to get users to use IE. They didn't force anyone to use IE, but by bundling it with Windows, they used their OS market share in order to increase their web browser market share. That is a monopolizing behavior.
If Google had used its search engine to get you to use Chrome or Chrome OS you would have had a point. AFAIK, anyone, with any web browser can use Google's search engine. If anything, they may be using C
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>giving away your OS/browser on your home page is akin in today's terms to supplying a browser on the install CD.
Which is perfectly legal - every Linux distro out there does it too - and was never the issue with microsoft. The issue was integrating windows 98 with I.E. in such a way that it was not possible to use one without the other - literally you couldn't uninstall IE as windows would STOP WORKING if you did.
Sure you could install another browser AS WELL - but since IE had to be there anyway and cou
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No it was "said" to be illegal to abuse a monopoly position in one market to take over another. In fact it wasn't just "said", it was and remains the law.
Re: (Score:2)
However, Google is a minority player in both the browser and OS markets. If they choose to bundle them together, neither provides all that much more leverage to the other, and certainly provides li
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft was also refusing to allow OEMs to install any other browser on the desktop and even for awhile on the system at all. It wasn't just that Microsoft was giving away a browser. It was that Microsoft was preventing other browsers from even being installed by default by system makers. You could download it after you got your PC, but Microsoft didn't want another browser to show up on your desktop or system when you booted it up for the first time.
That was one of the many problems that Microsoft got bu
Re: (Score:2)
This will be great on low powered netbooks and other such devices. I know I'll be installing it on my
Acer Aspire ONE. (Assuming it doesn't completely suck, that is!)
Re: (Score:2)
I've played around with ChromeOS on a virtual machine and it sucks. It's an OS for accessing Google apps and the web. Nothing else. Great if that's all You need, but I need a bit more.
There I was, the subject and mood were right. The girl agreed with me on ChomeOS -sort of anyway- and I was working my way over her shoulder towards her back and trying to undo her bra.
Then you come along telling ChomeOS sucks and all I get now is the cold shoulder and a disturbed, alarmed look.
Buddy, I'd almost made it.What a party pooper you are. Sheesh!
Re:Yawn. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing says it has to replace your existing laptop or workstation.
I'm quite looking forward to ChromeOS. I work there so I'm hoping the big G will give me one for testing, but if not then I might buy one myself if they review well.
See ChromeOS as kind of like an "extreme" version of the Mac or iPad value proposition. The hardware and software are very closely integrated so you won't get much of the benefit if you're running it in a virtual machine. But if you're running it on hardware designed for it in mind, you get a number of benefits.
If I look at what I do today with my old MacBook, 90% of my time is spent in Chrome anyway. MacOS' shitty window management just gets in the way, frankly. The only other apps I use are iTunes (for internet radio and occasionally movies rented online), and the terminal emulator. Fortunately shellinabox [google.com] provides easy access to remote terminals without needing a local ssh or terminal emulator. I have it set up on a colo box I rent from Linode and it works pretty well.
ChromeOS promises watertight security (as opposed to MacOS/Windows/Linux), an end to stupid update nags, extremely good and consistent performance, simple and efficient window management .... lots more. The downside is that I'll need to use a separate machine occasionally for more power user stuff like programming, at least until a web based IDE like Bespin starts getting good. Other things, like word processing/spreadsheets/PDF viewing/chat/etc can be done via web apps already.
Also, at some point the promise of NativeClient will arrive and then porting existing native apps (like maybe emacs) to be runnable in Chrome will become possible.
All that remains is a good multimedia experience really. I can listen to most net radio stations today using Flash, but it wouldn't be as nicely integrated as iTunes. And as for renting movies, well I keep hoping Microsoft will stop sitting on its ass and make Xbox Live movie store work here in Switzerland, but it's been years so I'm not holding my breath. International media licensing is such a disaster zone.
Basically, I think ChromeOS will deliver a lot of the benfits people see in an iPad but without the obnoxious tablet form factor. It's a clean break, a fresh new OS but with things that actually matter for getting things done, like "keyboards".
Re: (Score:2)
SlashGear mentions Netbooks, but their source (Reuters [reuters.com]) does not; there is one mention of Laptops and none of Netbooks.
Is this just an assumption on SlashGear's part, or are they quoting some other, unnamed source?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Will it run my games? Y/N
Will it run them reliably, effecivly and as table as Windows 7? Y/N
will it have support, patching, ease of use and compatibility with 3d party aspects? (printers for example) Y/N
if N to any... thanks, i'll stick to windows.
Will the iPad do those? Because that's what this thing is, essentially - an OS for making an iPad-alike.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Chrome OS isn't designed to require an "always on" internet connection, which is why features for offline use of apps are key to it; it requires i